Thursday, December 8th, 2016

Remy wants to be able to apply progressive enhancement to React: server-side and client-side rendering, sharing the same codebase. He succeeded, but…

In my opinion, an individual or a team starting out, or without the will, aren’t going to use progressive enhancement in their approach to applying server side rendering to a React app. I don’t believe this is by choice, I think it’s simply because React lends itself so strongly to client-side, that I can see how it’s easy to oversee how you could start on the server and progressive enhance upwards to a rich client side experience.

I’m hopeful that future iterations of React will make this a smoother option.

Progressive enhancement’s core value proposition, for me, is that HTML and CSS have features that are powerful in their own right. Using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript together makes for more reliable products than just using Javascript alone in a single-page-app.

This philosophy doesn’t apply to every website out there, but it sure as hell applies to a lot of them.

There’s a whole category of native apps that could just as easily be described as “artisanal web browsers” (and if someone wants to write a browser extension that replaces every mention of “native app” with “artisanal web browser” that would be just peachy).

The web is and will always be the most popular mobile operating system in the world – not iOS or Android. It’s important that the next generation of software companies don’t focus exclusively on building native iOS or Android versions of existing web apps.

Just make sure those web apps render and work well in the new wave of mobile browsers – messengers. Don’t build for iOS or Android just for an imaginary distribution opportunity. Distribution exists where people spend most of their time today – social and messaging apps, the new mobile browser for a bot-enabled world.

I always loved the way that Gov.uk styled their radio buttns and checkboxes with nice big visible labels, but it turns out that users never used the label area. And because it’s still so frickin’ hard to style native form elements, custom controls with generated content is the only way to go if you want nice big hit areas.

Henrik points to some crucial information that slipped under the radar at the Chrome Dev Summit—the Android OS is going to treat progressive web apps much more like regular native apps. This is kind of a big deal.

It’s a good time to go all in on the web. I can’t wait to see what the next few years bring. Personally, I feel like the web is well poised to replace the majority of apps we now get from app stores.

There’s definitely something “alien” about a service worker—it’s kind of like a virus that gets installed on the user’s device. I’ve taken to describing it as “a man-in-the-middle attack on your own website” which makes sound a bit scarier than is necessary.